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This was my contribution to Jeremy Onsmith and Ivan Brunetti's Gocco Box Set, a collection of work by 17 artists doing prints on the Print Gocco. I wonder if they didn't just find the nifty kraft paper boxes at a store somewhere first and come up with an idea for how to use them afterwards. In any case, it's a fantastic little set of prints, with a surprising variety of approaches to using the Gocco on display. If you can get a set through Jeremy or one of the contributors at a comics show like the Small Press Expo, grab it (but don't ask me, I'm fresh out of 'em).

The disassembled airplane in the picture is part of an old A-6 Intruder Navy jet, waiting to get put back together at the Yankee Air Museum at Willow Run Airport near Ann Arbor. I drew this at an air show only a few weeks before fire destroyed the museum's main hangar. Their historic airplanes were rescued but a lot of donated av…

Another movie review illustration, this time, obviously, for "Dr. Strangelove." I saw this film again a few years ago at the Detroit Art Institute's film theater with Matt Feazell, and I swear to God we were the only ones in the theater who were aware that it was a comedy! The people around me were so stone-quiet I started feeling self-conscious about laughing... almost.

The Detroit Film Theater, though, is the place to go for art films here in the 313, so if you're ever in town with nothing else to do, check 'em out.

Here's an illustration I did for the free paper I work for, to go with a review of the recent Ramones documentary. I sold the original after a show at Hamtramck city hall, where I, Matt Feazell and Suzanne Baumann had cartoons and other work on display. (This blog is a good repository for rarities and stuff I no longer have around. Gone-but-not-forgotten art, excellent!)

I first created this mini-comic version of the story of the apocryphal/Biblical heroine Judith a few years ago using the Print Gocco screenprinter. I printed 150 copies or so and hand-stitched the binding.

Judith was a favorite subject of 17th century painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose Judiths, unlike those of her male contemporaries, actually looked capable of and predisposed to sawing a man's head off his shoulders. One of Artemisia's masterpieces is here in the Detroit Institute of Arts, a suspensful post-beheading Judith scene.

This pristine turquoise Beetle sat on the side of a busy street here in town for months before some lucky guy bought it. I kept expecting to walk by one morning and find it sideswiped or rear-ended. I can't afford to buy a car that would amount to an expensive new hobby - I'm strictly a "reliable beater" owner, unfortunately - but I can lust after them and tuck them away in my sketchbook.

I've noticed that surprisingly few comics artists are any good at drawing cars. Seems like most of the car drawings I see in comics tend to range from merely serviceable to downright awkward. They're such familiar machines, you'd think they'd be easier to draw but I think maybe the familiarity somehow actually makes them harder to get right. I think you have to approach drawing a car the way you would a human body - they need to look alive somehow. (Someday I'll put together a coherent rap on this and write a proper essay, maybe.) And as distinctive as these old V…

This is one of several prints I've made with my wonderful little Print Gocco. The Gocco is this shoebox-sized Japanese gizmo that's designed to make miniature screenprints, using a thermal process to burn the screens from photocopies. It's handy and lots of fun to use, and apparently going extinct, at least in the US, much to my chagrin. I wrote a short article about its demise for the Detroit free paper, Metro Times, and you can get more info at the Save Gocco site

I've been in love with the Gocco and have evangelized on its behalf for years now, and everyone who touches one seems to fall in love with it too, especially DIY craftsy-types and mini-comics makers. In a desert of electronic reproduction and graphic design processes, the Gocco is an oasis of old-fashioned hands-on art making. If the supplies for the thing dry up and it becomes impossible to use, it's really going to be a sad thing. I'll post more of my Gocco images in coming days.

Yeah, that's me. A few years back I did a six-page comic in one of my minis that channeled gospel passages via E.C. Segar's Popeye characters, and it's pretty much my Greatest Hit, the one most people who know my stuff remeber most fondly. It was one of those things where once you have the equation Popeye=Jesus in your head, all the other characters and situations kinda fell into place.

Welcome, y'all, to my electronic junk drawer, my online scrapbook of art, comics, beard-strokingly brilliant personal insights and/or wise-ass remarks. I have a similar pile of miscellaneous creativity here at my house, but it comes in a dull, battered cardboard box instead of a shiny, glowing plastic one like you have, so consider yourself lucky!